“They don’t exercise but never gain a pound”
August 20th, 2007 by Y.G.I’m beginning to get talented at pondering matters out of nowhere, then pondering so much that I feel like sharing them here.
So, this post won’t exactly be about tricks to help losing weight… but it could be. Or could become. It all depends.
Recently, I was reading an older article about genetic factors related to obesity, then discussed it with other people concerned with weight loss. Evidently, at some point this could only lead us to mentioning people who claim they never exercise, yet never gain one single unwanted pound either–and same for the eating habits we think are theirs. And all of a sudden, it got me thinking. Maybe they do exercise. Maybe they just don’t consider it like exercise that deserves being spoken about, or like exercise at all.
I’m not a naturally thin person, nor will I ever be freed, I’m afraid, from having to monitor my activity level and eating until my dying day. However, even a person like me does have her own perceptions of what she does. And to be honest, when at last I paid really close attention to the way I’ve been slowly but steadily upping my daily physical activity, I realized that compared to my previous habits of never going out and basically spending my days sitting on a chair, I do exercise. It just doesn’t feel like it.
I do exercise when I bike more than one hour every day to go to work… but since it’s to go from point A to point B, I automatically dump it in the ‘commute’ category. Pedaling on a stationary bike in a gym for one hour would feel like exercising, because it’s oh so artificial and out of context, so to say. However, am I not expending calories by going to the office this way? Way more than if I were to take the bus or the car?
And when I’m itching for moving, yet can’t go out due to having to study, I now systematically end up fidgeting at my desk, wriggling my bottom on my chair, crossing and uncrossing my legs, and jiggling my knees…
Therefore, I’ve also tried to look more closely at those ‘naturally thin’ people I know. And lots of them do just that. They fidget. They pace in the whole room when they’re on the phone instead of remain sitting. They don’t think twice before walking down three flights of stairs to take the trashcan out, and don’t worry about doing that at the same time they go to work ’so that they don’t waste time’.
All of this tends to pile up. All of this, while, alright, not exactly deserving the pompous name of ‘exercise’, is a kind of activity that more than one person in this world doesn’t do. (Try using a pedometer, if you’ve never done that; it is surprising how we think we can easily walk those 10,000 recommended steps a day, yet actually end up walking barely 4,000 or even less.)
So maybe, just maybe, it is a path worth investigating. Maybe exercise doesn’t always have to be that boring thing we have to stuff between a busy day at the office and a busy evening at home, between work and housework duties. Maybe we can already help, even if just a little, by consciously choosing to favour that kind of activity, rather than minimize the amount of steps we take. And maybe, after a while, this will just become an automatism.
I’m not sure. I can’t say it’s a 100% assured key. But… just ‘maybe’.
